It’s finally arrived, the conclusion of Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series, and its final volume: Warheart.

Well, I had thought the series ended with Confessor, the twelfth volume in the series (if you include the prequel novella Debt of Bones). It rounded off the main story arc of the Imperial invasion and seemed, for a while, like the end of the series. Then, four years later, Goodkind returned to the world of the Sword of Truth with a new novel, The Omen Machine. And now, with the publication of Warheart late last year, the series has concluded.

But if you haven’t read any of the other books, why read Warheart? Is it even worth starting the series? Seventeen volumes is a large commitment to make – seventeen books featuring the same characters could easily become stale or formulaic, or perhaps even dull and interesting. Judge for yourself of course, but I found that Warheart rounded off the series – published over 21 years – rather nicely. There were all the usual ingredients of a Terry Goodkind novel – fulsome descriptions of setting and place, moral philosophies and dilemmas, and some great action scenes – and, for anyone who has read the series from start to finish, a sense of faint melancholy as the story wound towards its conclusion. It is fair to say that I didn’t rate some of the more recent novels in the series as highly as those that came before Confessor, but Warheart was indeed a return to form. It wasn’t perfect: scenes where characters from the series met their end felt a little rushed, and sometimes the pace slowed just a little too much, but the some of the sheer joy I felt reading Wizard’s First Rule (the first book in the series) returned. And, after writing hundreds of thousands of words about the same characters for over twenty years, I think the author must be credited for maintaining a high standard without the series becoming formulaic or predictable.

And if you haven’t read any of Terry Goodkind’s books, I would urge you to. Start with Wizard’s First Rule. I haven’t ever read a book like it, and it remains one of the few that I’ll read again and again; I can think of no higher praise.

I have, until now, happily used Microsoft Word for my writing. For 10 years I have hammered away at the keyboard, learning the application’s features, its strengths and weaknesses. But, over the last few years another application has emerged, one geared specifically towards writers: Scrivener. Originally developed for the Apple Mac, it has since ported across to Windows, and has been gaining popularity. Several people have encouraged me to try the software (there’s a trial period before you have to buy it) and, finally, I gave in and decided to find out what all the fuss was about (even if I am a little late to the Scrivener party).

Over the coming weeks and months I’ll post my experiences with Scrivener and Word, and finally decide which will be my weapon of choice. Today, though, here are a few of the most general points.

Microsoft’s Word is an all-round performer: good for writing letters, reports, and even long novels. Scrivener is slanted heavily towards writers – short stories, novels, and screenplays. Both offer backup facilities to some extent. Microsoft’s One Drive allows remote storage in the nebulous Cloud, while Scrivener can save multiple backups of your project (the 3, 5, 10, or 15 most recent copies) to a chosen location. It also integrates with Dropbox, a cloud-based storage service. Scrivener also has a “Snapshot” feature to save your file at a moment in time, and allows you to roll back changes to this point.

Both programs offer custom dictionaries – essential for anyone writing Science Fiction or Fantasy. With Word you can use multiple custom dictionaries and, for example, keep a separate one for each novel or series you are working on. Scrivener only has a single custom dictionary (a “personal word list”). You can remove or add words at will, but if writing a large project with a lot of custom names this could be cumbersome when you finish and want to reset your custom dictionary. There may be ways around this, but the naked version of Scrivener is one dictionary, one word list.

Word keeps a word count of your document, but also keeps track of your total writing/editing time in minutes. Divide by 60 to find out how many hours of writing you’ve put in and you’ve got your writing time. Word count is only for the whole document or selected text. If you keep track of your starting point in a writing session, you can select the text from there onwards and do a word count to see how much you’ve done. It’s not elegant, but it works. Scrivener doesn’t keep track of your editing/writing time for you, but does offer more flexibility for word count. You can set a target for your project, and concurrently set a session (from opening a project to closing it again) target. Helpfully, you can display this in a corner of your screen and let the progress bar challenge you to write more.

Formatting in Word can be tricky at times, and particularly when trying to export your manuscript to a service like Amazon’s Createspace. It can, in fact, be a total nightmare. Scrivener offers more diversity for formatting: you can export in different file formats (including Word-compatible .doc formats) and even save your story as a kindle file (once you’ve installed Amazon’s KindleGen program, which is nice and easy to do).

To mark the sad passing of Iain M. Banks, a giant of modern Science Fiction, this inaugural list of best reads of the year (not necessarily published in the year) will comprise 9 great Fantasy and Science Fiction novels rather than the more traditional top 10. Why 9? Well, 9 is integral to Marain in the Culture novels.

9. Goblin Moon by Teresa Edgerton

8. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

7. Warheart by Terry Goodkind

6. Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny

5. Shattered by Kevin Hearne

4. Knight’s Shadow by Sebastien de Castell

3. Lexicon by Max Barry

2. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

1. The Martian by Andy Weir. A great SF novel, packed with dry humour and hard science. It’s difficult to write a novel that mostly features a single character in a single location, but Weir does it well and crafts a great story in the process.

However you approach becoming a writer (whether you write first, learn the techniques later, or study before taking up the pen, or a combination of both) there’s always room for improvement. There is a great deal to be learned from courses, residencies, books, and even the internet, but one near-guaranteed method to improving as a writer is, simply, to write.

Write regularly – or as regularly as you can – and write often. It doesn’t matter whether you allocate a set portion of time to write or set yourself a goal (e.g. 750 words per session) but writing regularly will help you develop as a writer. Once you’ve learned the “basics”, putting that into practice is a great way to learn. You’ll encounter plot and technical problems along the way, and solving those problems will help you grow as a writer. I’ve found that if you have an extended break from writing, those first few sessions back at the keyboard are usually tricky – the result of being out of practice. So, write, write, write and give yourself the best chance to become a better writer.